Oxford Internet Institute

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Lectures and seminars from the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), University of Oxford. The OII is a leading world centre for multidisciplinary research and teaching on the social factors that are shaping the Internet, and their implications for society. Areas covered by our podcasts include: social networking, Internet regulation, safety and security online, e-government and democracy, civil society, open access, identity, e-learning, citizen journalism and new media, and the future of the Internet itself.

Tim Wu will discuss the science of attention, the history of the attention industries, and some of the harms caused by overharvesting. He will also propose a model of attention sovereignty of importance for the future.

This seminar will investigate how different technologies were used by CDAC Network Members in the immediate response to Typhoon Haiyan, focusing particularly on how needs assessment data was collected, shared and acted upon.

Jonathan Bright explores the impact of social media on news consumption. He examines how social media users choose what to share, how this varies by platform, and what the implications may be for the type of news coverage that people receive.

Every problem we experience will have some intersection with the Internet, and will invite the same solution we’ve gotten in the fights over obscenity and copyright infringement: can’t you just break the Internet a little, so that it fixes my problem?

Visualization is a ubiquitous technology, just like telecommunication. However, unlike a telephone system, humans play an integral part inside the "box" of visualization. This poses a significant challenge in establishing a theory of visualization.

In recent years, a number of fully global, online labor markets have emerged. In these markets, buyers hire workers from around the world to perform tasks amenable to remote completion, such as computer programming, data entry and graphic design. This tal

Ethan Zuckerman explores contemporary anxieties about "a crisis in civics" and looks at the idea that civics is changing along with digital media to become more participatory and inclusive, but harder to understand and predict.

The Internet and web are creating a new space for networking people, information and other resources: this has the potential to become an important 'fifth estate' to support greater accountability in politics, the media and other institutional arenas.

Veronica Sartore interviews Dr Bernie Hogan about his research on the social networking site Facebook, differences between online and offline relationships, how personal boundaries are regulated and the strength of weak ties.

Eugene provokes us to question some assumptions related to computer architecture, the definitions of security, and how best to build trusted systems. Are current methods of defining security appropriate? How might we better design a system to be secured?

How do we build trustworthy hardware, and how can we use that to increase the trustworthiness of broader distributed computation? Sean presents some things he's learned, some things he wishes he had done differently, and some things he'd still like to do.

Roger Brownsword argues that the legal community should be concerned to contribute to debates about the implications and regulation of rapidly developing and converging technologies (eg ICTs, biotech / nanotech).

JP Singh discusses the role played by diplomacy and negotiations in economic globalization, exploring possibilities for transformational problem-solving through multilateral diplomacy, allowing an adjustment of positions so that mutual gains will result.

By investigating price and capacity trends over the past century, Eli Noam shows that it is possible to predict the type, style, and genres of media content of a future ultra-broadband infrastructure, which allows a richer, more bit-intensive content.

Marcus Foth demonstrates the value of various tools and services (eg Second Life) for engaging people in novel and participatory planning exercises, and for investigating how the public interpret and understand proposed urban designs and urban planning.

Marcus Foth overviews various urban informatics projects, exploring the communicative ecology of urban residents, community engagement using public history and digital storytelling, and social navigation for mobile urban information systems.

How have social media changed the nature of the scientific debate among scientists? Are they challenging the supremacy of editors, reviewers and science communicators? How have they impacted on engagement with the public understanding of science?

Can Web 2.0 tools (eg blogs, social networking and wikis) enhance our democratic freedoms? Or can we dismiss the socially egalitarian and politically democratic potential of these social media? Have any significant social impacts been ignored so far?

Are social media tools likely to prove effective in engaging any voters except those who are already interested in politics? Is their apparent 'democratisation' of traditional party structures to be believed?

Among the traditional media, blogs and other contributions to citizen journalism have for a long time been regarded as posing a significant threat to 'quality' news reporting ... is this a valid view? What (if anything) can social media offer?

What lies around the corner for the Internet .. and how do we avoid it? How can we study and affect the future of the Internet using the distributed power of the network itself? This is Jonathan Zittrain's inaugural lecture at the University of Oxford.

If social media are the defining advance of Web 2.0, whereby the network-as-platform enabled users not just to download content but to create it, tag it and share it ... what will the next decade hold? Will we continue to Tweet?

What do companies expect to gain from maintaining an online 'social media' presence? What are the implications of these trends for the development of traditional public relations strategies and business journalism?

Manuel Castells draws on arguments from his book Communication Power in discussing the structural causes and implications of the 2008 economic crisis, and in claiming that we are moving, without much understanding, towards a new form of global capitalism.

Duncan Watts discusses how the Internet is beginning to lift a long-time constraint of social science research on emergent collective behaviour: the difficulty of measuring interactions between people, at scale, over time, while also observing behaviour.

Examining technical, legal and cultural strategies by the recording industry to persuade people that file-sharing is impossible, immoral, un-cool or dangerous, and the failure of these strategies. Alternative business models are discussed.

Discussion of media buying and the attention-creation industry - showing how the fixation on audiences' click-like behaviour is a disruptive institutional force, and how buyers' new approaches to attention are creating new forms of social discrimination.

A discussion of how largely well-intentioned political and legal reactions to the highest-profile risks of ICT creates a danger of perhaps killing the goose that is giving us golden eggs of innovation, decentralization, and personal empowerment.

This forum looks at the state of the art of academic research on relationships and the Internet and how this research informs research on the social aspects of the Internet in general, such as issues of trust and identity.

The Web 2.0 world is commonplace but the promise of massive scale human computing has barely been exploited. This seminar explores the potential, challenges, and promises for next-generation technologies that can empower humanity to address key problems.

Professor Soumitra Dutta discusses the Global Information Technology Reports: the world's most comprehensive and authoritative international assessment of the impact of ICTs on the development process and the competitiveness of nations.

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger looks at the important role that forgetting has played throughout human history, the surprising phenomenon of perfect remembering in the digital age, and why we must reintroduce our capacity to forget.

The emergence of Web 2.0-enabled social media online provides a new opportunity to develop assessments that match with, and draw upon students' engagement with online knowledge networking, creating new possibilities for 'authenticity' in assessment.

This talk discusses research being undertaken at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago and its consequences for future forms of computer-mediated communication and for the Internet.

This talk recaps the history of racist griefing online and link the current crisis in racial discourse in the US with this practice, exploring the implications for digital games as a transnational public sphere.

Yorick Wilks explores the state of the art in modelling realistic conversation with computers over the last 40 years, and asks what we would want in a conversational agent (or 'Companion') designed for a long-term relationship with a user.

Grant Blank summarises his lecture on how a new pattern of Internet access is developing through the use of a growing variety of devices than enable increasing mobility: these people are "Next Generation Internet Users".

Erina Lee discusses the importance of similarity between partners in terms of long-term relationship satisfaction. She discusses some compatibility dimensions that have been considered by eHarmony, as well as future directions for research.

Joseph Walther describes the hyperpersonal model and its relevance to the study of online dating. 'Idealisation' of perception and presentation online can facilitate the selection process, but may have unforseen consequences when people eventually meet.

Monica Whitty discusses her recent work on dating scams, which has focused on attempting to identify a typology of victims, recognizing the techniques used by scammers, and also the psychological impact of the scams themselves.

Baroness Greenfield discusses how Information Technology is changing the way humans think and feel. Whilst there are clear benefits, she also highlights the less desirable consequences, and suggests how best to minimise these threats.

Professor Steve Woolgar introduces and discusses the main themes of the Visualisation in the Age of Computerisation conference, by reflecting on recent changes in visualisation media and considering some of the implications of these changes for research.

Revolutions are currently sweeping the Arab world, from Tunisia to Egypt and Libya to Bahrain. The Internet has been reported as a key factor, but we in fact know little of its role in these revolutions.

An increasing amount of social interaction is taking place online: analyzing this data computationally offers enormous potential to address long-standing scientific questions, and to harness and inform the design of future social computing applications.

Paul Millar, CEISMIC Canterbury Earthquakes Digital Archive project leader, discusses the role of digital humanities in developing an international resource to preserve the digital record of the earthquakes' impacts and the long-term process of recovery.

The OII's Founding Donor Dame Stephanie Shirley speaks about the sources of her innovation, the software house she founded back in 1962 and why she has already given away £65M to IT and autism projects.

Victoria Nash, talks to Pete Lomas, Founder and Trustee at Raspberry Pi, recipients of an Internet and Society Award in 2012 from OII, in recognition of their exemplary efforts in using the Internet for the public good in Britain.